First in a three-part series on faith and reason. Religion comes under fire from atheists because it's supposedly irrational, requiring the believer to sign up to propositions that amount to nonsense. And Christians of a certain persuasion often respond by arguing that properly understood, their faith is perfectly rational. But others claim that one of the key virtues of Christianity is that it's hard-wired for confounding reason, and for offending our notions of good sense. How do—or how should—faith and reason interact?

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David Rutledge: Welcome to the program - and the first in a three-part series on faith and reason. Over the next three weeks we'll be looking at Islam and Judaism — but today, Christianity: a religion that on one hand has a long tradition of hyper-rational theology, but on the other hand has a sort of built-in resistance to making perfect sense.

The eleventh-century Benedictine monk Anselm of Canterbury famously defined theology as ‘faith seeking understanding’. But for the Christian, there’s a sense in which understanding or reason exists in a state of tension with faith. Hence today’s program, which was produced by me, David Rutledge.

(Music)

Richard Dawkins (archival): In The God Delusion, I made a seven-point scale: one is, ‘I’m totally confident there is a God’; seven is, ‘I’m totally confident there is not a God’; six is, ‘To all intents and purposes, I’m an atheist, I live my life as though there is no God, but any scientist of any sense will not say that they positively can disprove the existence of anything.’ I cannot disprove the existence of the Easter Bunny and so I’m agnostic about the Easter Bunny. It’s in the same respect that I’m agnostic about God.

George Pell: What proof, by the way, would change your mind?

Richard Dawkins: That’s a very difficult and interesting question, because, I mean, I used to think that if somehow, you know, a great big giant 900-foot-high Jesus with a voice like Paul Robeson suddenly strode in and said, ‘I exist. Here I am,’ but even that I actually sometimes wonder whether that would…

George Pell: I’d think you were hallucinating…

Richard Dawkins: Exactly! I agree, I agree! (Laughter)

(Music)

David Rutledge: Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in conversation last year with Cardinal George Pell on the ABC’s Q&A program.

Since the publication of The God Delusion and the subsequent surge of popular interest in debunking religion, it’s become commonplace for recreational atheists to pit faith against reason, saying that the ridiculous thing and indeed the dangerous thing about Christians is that they believe in nonsense, and arrange their ethics and their politics according to the teachings of an ancient book full of outlandish stories about sky fairies and whatnot.

Well, it seems today that the neo-atheist push is somewhat running out of steam – there’s only so much mileage you can get out of jokes about the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But the tension between Christian faith and reason is a genuine one, and it’s that tension that we’ll be exploring today.

Some Christians believe that one of the key virtues of Christianity is that it’s hardwired for confounding reason, and for offending our notions of good sense. So does that mean that the atheists have a point?

Here’s Michael Jensen, rector of St Mark’s Anglican Church in Darling Point, Sydney, and author of a recent book entitled My God, My God: Is it Possible to Believe Anymore?

Michael Jensen: There is a point, in that I think there is some religion that is contrary to sense. I think to put religion in a basket is a difficult thing to do, actually. What religion is, is another whole question, because in many cases you could argue that civic religion is the most prominent religion or faith, and much of what we call “religion” is contrary to sense or is difficult, pernicious, requires us to do things that dehumanise us in many ways.

I take there to be a critique – which is already actually offered in some of the things that the prophets of the Old Testament say – of deviant religious behaviou,r or religious behaviour that’s outrageous. But at the same time I think partly the critique comes from people who have made an impermeable category of this thing called ‘Reason’—capital ‘R’ and usually capital letters for the rest—and really, I want to question whether there is such a clean thing as ‘reason’.

There is ‘knowing’ and there are ‘knowers’ and I would say, in the religious sense, faith is a part of the way in which human beings grasp the world and their experience and life. It’s one that has produced much of great value. And so to say that it’s unworthy of intelligent people really is a very unintelligent thing. It’s deaf to history, and to the breadth of human experience.

Francis Spufford: No, they don’t have a point. What they’re attempting to do is to tug the picture frame around the argument until what shows inside the frame is more to their liking.

David Rutledge: That’s Francis Spufford, whose most recent book, entitled Unapologetic, takes a look at the ways in which Christianity does make sense – but it’s a sense that can’t be adequately contained within the paradigms of scientific reason.

Francis Spufford: There used to be a kind of détente between belief and non-belief, a kind of a state in which mutual respect was possible, resting on a kind of foundation of acknowledged ignorance: they didn’t know, and admitted it; we didn’t know, we admitted it. They would go, ‘I can see a certain nobility in your wild gamble on the universe having some meaning,’ yada, yada, and people could nod to each other—sometimes a bit frostily, arguments about the Spanish Inquisition and so on—but there was a basis for getting along there.

Whereas what has happened has been an attempt to say, ‘Actually, no, there isn’t an even balance of probabilities to our ignorance here, so in fact, our sense that there’s no God is much, much, much more probable than your sense that there might be a God, so the burden of proof is all on you and we need show no respect whatever for your wild leap of faith, because we now consider it to be a wild leap of self-evident nonsense.’

And this has some interesting rhetorical effects. I think it’s got a lot to do with how much more bad-tempered the argument has got over the last few years. I also think it’s groundless. Because once you look at the reasons why religion is self-evidently nonsense as far as they’re concerned—why they think it’s a wild and outlying possibility, which it’s up to religious people to prove the merit of—and what you see is a set of cultural judgements, things filtered through our public imagination into apparent common sense, things which have got much more to do with how people live and the tendency of people to play five-a-side football on Sunday morning rather than go to church and things, rather than any actual philosophical advance. I don’t think it’s got traction, what they’re saying.

Christian Wiman: Dawkins has a point, and Christopher Hitchens—those guys have points when they say Christianity contradicts reason. I mean, if you go back to Martin Luther, he said that reason is a great whore, so he himself was aware of the contradiction.

David Rutledge: Christian Wiman is a poet and senior lecturer in religion and literature at Yale Divinity School.

Christian Wiman: I think if anyone looks at their life seriously – rationally, let’s say – then I think that he would have to conclude that the major decisions of life are not made according to reason: you don’t fall in love rationally, you don’t find your calling by means of reason, it isn’t reason that sort of crushes your heart when you look at your kids. You know, why in the world would you expect to think your way to God, if all these other areas of your life you’re not doing that?

David Rutledge: A lot of Christians I think do do that, though. I mean, there are Christians of a certain persuasion who will counter accusations of irrationality by trying to demonstrate that Christianity, properly understood, is perfectly rational. And we’ve seen attempts by Christian theologians right down the ages to frame Christianity in terms that make sense; I’m thinking of Thomas Aquinas and his five proofs of the existence of God. Does this sort of rational enquiry get us anywhere in the end, do you think?

Christian Wiman: I don’t think so. I don’t find it very helpful. You know, if somebody’s absolutely stuck in a dichotomous worldview, it might jolt them out of it so that they can begin to think of Christianity in at least some sort of way. But Emily Dickinson has a great line, ‘Too much of proof affronts belief.’ If you try to look at God dead on, rationally, try to figure him out, so to speak, you’ll never get anywhere. Thomas Merton said trying to solve the problem of God is like trying to see your own eyeballs. It doesn’t work. And so, no, I don’t find those efforts very useful.

David Rutledge: And so a question like, ‘Does God exist?’—I mean, this just isn’t a crucial question for you in your own faith and practice?

Christian Wiman: Oh, it is a crucial question. I’m tormented by the question. It is a crucial question. I often feel that the modern anxieties over the existence of God, those are a sort of debased form of the fear that God is absent because we’re not worthy of his presence. And that’s a feeling that the people in the Renaissance had; for example, George Herbert—the great poet George Herbert—wrote, ‘O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue / To cry to thee, / And then not hear it crying!’ That seems to me a more noble sort of anxiety to have than the fear that God doesn’t exist.

My own sense is that our notions of existence are probably too small to contain the forms in which God exists and so the question is sort of doomed from the start. But I’m stuck… I get stuck on it just like everyone else does.

Francis Spufford: It’s not an answerable question. I do, as a matter of fact, believe that God exists, but I can’t know it, and the idea of banging endlessly on about His existence seems to me to ask the most boring possible question about God, as well as asking a question we can’t settle. So, I’ve got a friend who calls them the ‘Evidence Daleks’ because they’re constantly going [in Dalek voice], ‘Where is your evidence?’ And I would rather talk about things beyond the range of Evidence Daleks.

Not that it doesn’t matter whether God exists – I’m not saying religion is a delightful spare time activity which can be conducted in the absence of truth – I’m saying that the envelope that contains the news about whether God is real or not is sealed, and is going to remain sealed, and that it is therefore sensible to ask other questions. Because if we can’t open the bloody envelope, we might as well ask what happens when we believe what the tradition of belief has meant, how belief fits together with the lives we have now, how we put belief together with the respect for science that we all ought to have—especially Christians; if you follow a God of truth you’re supposed to not be frightened of the truth wherever it goes.

Also, there’s something culturally misleading about where the argument’s got stuck about whether God exists. We’ve had religion reduced to this sort of Punch and Judy show; kind of, ‘Oh, no, he doesn’t,’ ‘Oh, yes, he does,’ ‘Oh, no, he doesn’t,’ bang, bang, bang, bang. And it produces very little light. And it actually persuades non-religious people—both the kind of the hardcore hobbyists of unbelief, who have this powerful negative emotional relationship with belief and what… they’re anti-religious, both them and the huge middle ground of people who just aren’t bothered—it leaves them under a misapprehension about what believers are. It makes people think that believers are people who get up in the morning and go, ‘Does God exist? As a religious person I care strongly about this! I’m going the spend the rest of the day thinking, “Does God exist? Is he there??”’ And it’s not the case. Since we don’t know, but have decided to take the leap of faith, what we actually spend our days doing is – you know, living, feeling, hoping, loving, trusting, all of that stuff.

And that, it seems to me, is now more mysterious to the world outside Christian belief than it ever has been before. People think that we must be engaged in this strange slightly alien set of activities which don’t touch on the ordinary conduct of lives. Whereas, they are absolutely a response to the same material of human life that everybody else is feeling.

(Music)

David Rutledge: St Anselm’s eleventh-century definition of theology as ‘faith seeking understanding’ is still a pretty good one and Christian theology has developed a strong tradition of rationalist analytic enquiry. But that doesn’t make it an empirical discipline, nor should theologians mistake themselves for scientists, according to Father Barry Brundell, who’s the editor of Compass magazine and visiting fellow in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of New South Wales.

Barry Brundell: Theological methods are many, but they’ve one common goal: that of giving a rational account of the Christian faith. So the theologian is a listener to the Word of God who interprets it in the light of the articulations of its meaning in the testimonies of tradition and in the lived experience of the Christian community, past and present. Well, rationalists think that all this is nonsense. They’ve a right to their opinion and we’ll fight to the death to preserve that right for them, but along with many centuries of theologians, we disagree with them.

So, scientific methods, on the other hand, are quite different. In the natural sciences methods are many also, because there are many subjects of scientific enquiry. But all natural scientific methods seek explanations that are in specific ways related to evidence obtained by observations and they do not accept as scientific explanations that are not in any way—not even indirectly—empirically verifiable. In natural science, obtaining predicted, observable results—even if indirectly observable—normally determines the credibility of a theory or hypothesis.

So theology’s a systematic exploration of something not seen nor empirically verifiable nor logically inferred from observable phenomena, but it’s believed.

David Rutledge: There’s been a lot of enthusiasm over the years—I think this became really popular in the seventies, when people started writing popular books about quantum physics and what was going on in the quantum realm… the sort of the strangeness and the paradoxical nature of the quantum world used as a means of arguing that science can approach a sort of mysticism – sort of breaking down that barrier, if you like, between science and theology. It’s proved to be very popular, but how successful in your opinion is that, either as theology or as science?

Barry Brundell: No, I deplore that sort of a thing. They’re attempting to create what I might call, ‘mystical science’, people who are impressed by particular scientific explanations and want to recommend their theology or spirituality by piggybacking them onto those scientific explanations. Or they are people who want to present some area of scientific explanation as religious or spiritual.

I mean, Fritjof Capra was one of the most popular authors who did just that, his The Tao of Physics, which was published in 1975. It was a book about finding links between physics and eastern religions. So from talk about comparisons between concepts and worldviews of physicists and eastern mystics, he moves gratuitously, in my opinion, to write of parallels, profound similarities, profound harmonies and ultimately to extremely important connections.

Well, as far as I can see it’s totally inadequate evidence. He claims that physics and eastern religion are in a deep way one and the same.

David Rutledge: ‘One and the same’ is a big call.

Barry Brundell: Yeah, that’s right. And they’re just not sufficiently honouring the distinction between natural scientific findings, in the strict and only proper sense, and non-scientific explanations or speculations that have become attached to them. So he’s confusing discourses. Concepts and terms and theories belong in contexts. So science and mysticism, science and religion—two distinct ways of knowing. The mysticism or the religious or the scientist begins when his or her scientific activity leaves off.

So forcing science and religion to coalesce in any way with claims that they are intimately linked in a common quest wouldn’t be welcomed by scientists, who are concerned to uphold freedom of research. The least damage that these ideas could do is to release a cloud of mystic unknowing and imprecision into the laboratories. Nor should anyone who values eastern mystical traditions or any religious tradition welcome the prospect of such close links with science, because sciences have a habit of reassessing their views from the bottom up every so often and making it quite unwise to hitch one’s religious or mystical or theological wagon to any scientific star.

David Rutledge: Father Barry Brundell.

Well, theology and science might be separate discourses today, but that hasn’t always been the case. Michael Jensen:

Michael Jensen: The modern scientific method emerged from theological convictions that actually the world is ordered, it’s investigable, it’s good, but human beings are imperfect so we need to check what they do—that’s the empirical method, really. And it’s… in one sense, it’s theological convictions that give us the worldview which we now call the worldview of science. So I think theologians have done that in a brilliant way, even since the Middle Ages—Anselm being key and Thomas Aquinas is saying that really faith is the light along which we… by which we see the world. It’s not that we reason up to faith but faith actually illumines the things we know, our experience of the world and the things we know in it.

David Rutledge: What do you think about the development in, well, what goes by the name of postmodernist philosophy—I’m not sure I really like that term—but what we’ve seen over the last couple of decades as a sort of dethroning of science, if you like, or a suspicion of all kinds of master narratives, including the scientific master narrative? The postmodern take on it is that science is as subjective as any other discourse. It’s an approach which has all sorts of problematic implications for religion, of course, but is it something that Christians could use as a means of settling this to and fro between religion and science?

Michael Jensen: Yes, I think that postmodern thinkers have given us a great service by checking the pride of human reason, of this thing, this thing called human reason. It’s said, ‘Look, actually, we need to be a little bit more suspicious of our own objectivity, our own supposed objectivity and our own ability to reason.’

A parallel movement happened at the end of the First World War. The nineteenth century is the great era of human reason, of liberality, and yet it ends in the trenches. And philosophers like Heidegger and theologians like Karl Barth, they emerge from that period saying, ‘We need to be much less trusting in our own ability to see the world clearly.’ And I think postmodernity has done very much the similar thing, emerging from the 1960s and ‘70s. I think theologians have got a lot to… we can go along with a lot of what is being said there, because it perhaps clears the ground for us to say theology needs to be heard on its own terms, needs to be thought in its own way, according to its own parameters, and there is a space being created perhaps by that critique.

Contemporary theologians like… John Milbank in particular has been in the vanguard of this. And he wrote… he’s written some, I think, fascinating books where he takes postmodernism as a sort of battering ram to knock over the castles, the grand castles, of enlightenment, rationality and say, ‘Hang on a minute. Now, theology’s got something to say here and it’s been falsely excluded by these sort of bastions that have been developed which are blind to things like the way in which reason has been used to develop weapons of mass destruction, so-called reason.’ Reason has been… reason has not yet reconciled itself to the destruction of the planet. Reason has not yet produced an economic system that actually makes any kind of fairness possible. Reason has not yet developed a peaceful world; we’re still at war. Liberal democracy, which is the great sort of political philosophy which believes that it is reasonable and rational, still polices its borders by gushes of blood, you know? It still commits torture, it still commits rape, et cetera, et cetera.

So I find this a very, very compelling kind of line of argument. It says all the things we think make our life comfortable and secure actually perhaps they’re not as well-founded or as morally pure as we think they are.

David Rutledge: Michael Jensen.

And on RN, you’re listening to Encounter, this week exploring the tensions between faith and reason.

Christian thought in the West has been strongly influenced by philosophical dualism, the division of the world into pairs of conceptual opposites: spirit and flesh, mind and body, good and evil and so on. And one of the hallmarks of a dualist worldview is strict adherence to logical consistency – self-contradiction is the cardinal philosophical sin. But according to Lisa Isherwood, director of Theological Partnerships at the University of Winchester, God is bigger than our rational apprehension, and so a certain willingness to accept contradiction is essential to keeping our understanding of God from becoming narrow and confined.

Lisa Isherwood: It’s not just scientists, and particularly people like Dawkins. It’s not those people who try to make any sense of God too small and then illogical. I mean, theologians are very good at that, at making the concept of a God quite small, actually. So anything that will go much more towards paradox as well, I think this is a very important turn that theology has taken these days—that there doesn’t have to be anything logical in God, actually, in a concept of God. The created universe is full of paradoxes; the human person is full of paradoxes. So why, therefore, should we try to work towards a system that’s excluding paradox.

We should move away from what Christianity has gone for up to now—this perfect God, no flaws in this God at all, which is very much more, I think, a Platonic idea than it is a Christian idea. Because if Christians have said all along that the nature of God is reflected in Jesus, Jesus as a living being was far from perfect. I mean, the gospels that have been picked have done their best to create a sort of perfect picture, but, you know, the bits that have been left out and the other sources that we have, he was a human being, full of paradox, full of contradiction, full of everything.

Why do we have to move all the time to this idea of God as whole, as perfect? I think a movement that is broader and says that whatever we think the divine might be can be full of contradiction, can be full of being and non-being, as the language used to be—this I think is a good move, I think it’s a healthier move. And when I say ‘healthier’ I mean for people in their own psychology. Because we’ve seen in Christian history how people have crucified themselves because they believe they’re not perfect enough, or all sorts of psychological difficulties because of this perfect God who’s been this judge and this ruler and all of that. And it’s very unhealthy in terms of human flourishing.

David Rutledge: I’d like to go back to dualism, and look at the way in which reason is something that is gendered. We usually appeal to it as something sort of transcendent and value-free, but there is a critique which sees it as being gendered and somehow male-oriented. Can you outline this critique?

Lisa Isherwood: Well, when feminists first… feminist philosophers and theologians both started engaging with it, they realised that women know in a much more embodied way; they know differently. They don’t just solve things in terms of their heads. And Gilligan did a lot of work on this—she’s a psychologist…

David Rutledge: Carol Gilligan, yes.

Lisa Isherwood: Carol Gilligan did a lot of experiments, saying, ‘How do women solve problems?’ And it seemed to be much more embodied, much more networking. It was about other people being involved in the problem solving. Whereas men—well, we need to make a distinction about that—the male brain—tended to be much more, ‘Well, here are the facts. I’ll sort it out and this is it. And if people suffer with the decision, this is unfortunate but the decision is right and correct, and so we go with it.’

So of course women psychologists, philosophers, theologians started to make connections between this and how the world has been created with a sort of indisputable history—that men have until quite recently been the dominant voices in all these disciplines—and have said, ‘So, do we have the disciplines we have because they’ve been created by the male brain?’ So, the ‘male brain’ because there’s research now that shows that what we understand is this kind of dualistic brain can also be in women.

So they started to question, saying… ask a lot, ‘How do women do this?’ And it’s much more embodied. And of course they run the risk then of people saying, ‘Ah, so it’s irrational, it’s illogical.’

Lisa Isherwood: Absolutely! That’s why women don’t know these kinds of things and why women shouldn’t be priests and why women can’t be great philosophers and so on. It’s just different. And in fact we need to not be afraid of this word ‘illogical’ or ‘irrational’, because this is just a different way of knowing, a different way of being, bringing different faculties into the solution of problems or the way of approaching problems, and in fact brings about quite interesting… and it opens up a lot of questions that before have been quite closed and narrow.

So there is always the problem. I mean, I do remember as an undergraduate I used to say, ‘I feel…’ and my tutors used to tell me, ‘There’s no place for feeling in theology or philosophy. You will think, you will not feel.’ And it’s only sort of about 25 years later that I realised that actually I did have a right to feel about the things I was thinking about and the questions that were being put before us.

David Rutledge: How effective a challenge is it, though, if we consider that we’re living in a world which is highly, increasingly technologised – it seems that the rational brain, the ‘male brain’ if you like, is still as dominant as it ever was, in some ways. Is there a challenge for feminist theology to not be a sort of a ‘women’s group’ – you know, mounting very interesting criticism, but meanwhile the world just keeps turning as a reason-dominated world?

Lisa Isherwood: Well, I think perhaps I overuse the phrase ‘feminist theology’ because I think there are lots of other groups that are kind of challenging this now. I mean, there are lots of environmental groups that are not feminist groups and are made up of men and women who are saying, you know, ‘The way we are using technology and the way we’re approaching farming,’ or whatever, ‘is not life-giving, is not healthy. We are going to come to a point when that process is going to give up on us and we’re not going to have any food.’

There’s certainly a great number of psychologists and sociologists who are questioning young people’s sort of obsession with technology and saying, ‘Is that healthy?’ And at the same time, the fact that we can talk to each other from the other side of the world is very helpful, the fact that we can communicate by email is very helpful. But again I think we need to be very cautious about being led only by this rationalism and this intellectualism of ‘we can so we will.’

And I think it’s not just coming from feminist theologians, it’s coming from a wide range of people. I mean, capitalism, for example, has been organised and rationalised, whereas these movements of people who are saying, ‘It doesn’t actually work…’ I mean, the Zapatista declaration years ago was actually saying, you know, ‘It’s our bodies that are suffering as a result of western rationalism. Our children are dying. We’re dying young. We’re having all sorts of diseases. Our bodies are labouring under this. It can’t be right.’ So there wasn’t in their declaration a sort of intellectual response to the rationalism of global capital, there was actually an embodied response saying, ‘We’re suffering. It hurts,’ you know, ‘There has to be another way of doing this.’

(Music)

David Rutledge: The great challenge to Christian reason, and making sense of the world, is and always has been to find meaning in suffering. And this is something of which poet Christian Wiman has developed a keen awareness. This year he published a quite remarkable book entitled My Bright Abyss, which is an extended meditation on his own experience of suffering and joy, and how it led him to re-examine a Christian faith that had lain dormant for many years.

Christian Wiman: I’d gone through a long period of not being able to write. And I mean, writing had always been how I had felt any sense of otherness in my life at all—so just simply how I’d understood my life, understood what I was in the world. And poetry left me. And you can’t will poetry. I’ve always found that I can will prose, I can write prose, but it doesn’t satisfy the same spiritual impulse that poetry does and I cannot will poetry.

And it went away, and it went away for a long time—three years. And the world went pretty grey for me. I couldn’t figure out exactly my place in it. And then I got sick. I got a diagnosis of a very bad cancer. And in all those ways my life broke open and it made me need to articulate some kind of faith. As I say in the book, I knew that I believed, but I didn’t know what I believed. And so I set out to figure that out.

I guess it was about seven years ago that I actually started the book—that’s probably the dating—and yes, it was very much an emotional sort of compulsion. I did not feel like, I never have felt like, ‘Oh, I’m afraid I’m going to go to hell,’ or, ‘I’m afraid for my soul.’ I don’t tend to think in those terms, like I need to find my place in heaven or, you know, it wasn’t like that. It was more like, ‘Well, my heart is breaking right now and I need to figure out why.’

David Rutledge: Reading your book made me think of Nietzsche and he said something to the effect… I was trying to find the quote and I couldn’t find it, but it’s something about how happiness is a thoughtless state, while pain is more’ scientific’ if you like, it always raises the question of its origin. And I wonder if finding meaning in suffering is the greatest challenge to Christian reason, to sort of making sense of the world. Is that something that you’ve thought about?

Christian Wiman: It certainly is. I’ve done a great deal of thinking about it and at times I’ve thought that I’ve found meaning and at times I’ve had it obliterated. I think when you’re suffering—in the midst of genuine suffering—you can forget about finding meaning; you’re just trying to survive. But I have gone back and forth between a kind of absolute meaninglessness and a feeling of really great joy, of really a kind of joy that I’ve never had in my life, never been capable of in my life. So it’s been a very vertiginous experience, to say the least.

David Rutledge: Do you think the joy and the suffering have been in some sense part of the same experience: you wouldn’t have the joy if not for the suffering?

Christian Wiman: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, it’s the flipside. I think abundance and destitution are two facets of the one face of God. In a way you have to grasp the other, the opposite, whenever you’re feeling one of those feelings. Emily Dickinson had a famous phrase, ‘sumptuous destitution’, the kind of destitution that can flower. And Marilynne Robinson talks about, you know, when do we know anything so utterly as when we lack it, and need can blossom into all the compensations that it requires—it’s in her very first novel. And I’m very sympathetic to that notion of the joy being laced with pain and the complete emptiness being capable of a kind of flowering that you never would have dreamed possible.

David Rutledge: And of course it’s not the sort of thing that you can rationalise, I guess; you know, get your head around. I mean, it’s truly a paradox in the way you’re describing it.

Christian Wiman: It is. Yeah, it is truly a paradox and it must be experienced. It can’t even be articulated. I’m going some length to try to articulate it, but I think in the end that it cannot be articulated, it can only be experienced—as a poem, by the way. W.H. Auden has a great line that poetry is a ‘clear expression of mixed feelings.’ And I think poetry all those years was training… has been training me, preparing me, to experience the world in all its complexity and not try to define one side of it so that you can take hold of it.

David Rutledge: And I guess this, perhaps, is where Christianity is unique, in that it doesn’t just offer a sort of rational apprehension of suffering, but it offers an experience—right?—it offers a God who has been there, or who is there with you.

Christian Wiman: Yeah. Yeah, and for me I think we put too much emphasis on the resurrection of Christ, that the great miracle is the incarnation, that God exists in matter, that Christ is a human being, God was a human being. And that persists into the present. I understand God as being present in matter and that to me is the great miracle. I think about that, I find myself thinking about that a lot more than I think about the events later in Christ’s life, which are so dominant in Christianity.

David Rutledge: Christian Wiman.

We’ve noted earlier in the program that in spite of the dominance of philosophical logic and its teachings and traditions, Christianity has a certain built-in capacity for going against the grain of common sense. And much of this can be traced back to a famous verse in St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians where he says ‘Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks.’

But what exactly is Paul trying to say here? Michael Jensen:

Michael Jensen: It’s interesting to first of all point out that the word ‘stumbling block’ in Greek is skandalon—so it’s the scandal of Christianity. And it’s an interesting kind of word, isn’t it? That Christianity is scandalous and it’s great prophet, Paul, calls it scandalous. And he expects it to be rejected, he expects people not to believe it, he expects it not to be persuasive to some.

When he preached in the Areopagus in Athens, the great seat of philosophy, some did believe, some people thought, ‘This is ridiculous.’ So Christianity really does do something rather odd and that is it puts forward the story of a crucified god. This is unlike any god we could think of. This is not the god of the philosophers and in particular he’s saying the Greeks, the Greek philosophers, their idea of god is a kind of pure, rational being—he is pure thought. The idea that he would become incarnate and the idea that he would then expose himself to death is a gross one to the Greek mind.

Francis Spufford: For me, the foolishness that Paul is talking about there is to do with the way that Christianity points you emphatically away from self-protective common sense of various kinds. When Paul’s operating, philosophy is partly to do with cognition and truth and knowledge and things, but it’s also a discipline and a doctrine of how to live. There is a Greek tradition there which says what a good citizen is: there you are, you’re a political animal, like Aristotle says, you go to the gymnasium, you fulfil your duties in society, you are a man (obviously), you try to be virtuous, you die, there’s poetry. A ridiculous summary of Greek philosophy, by the way, but there we go.

And Christianity is asking for something much more paradoxical than that. It’s saying, ‘Stuff the virtues,’ or rather, the virtues are only by-products of much, much more important things, that you should make a prat of yourself in the world’s eyes, you should trip over your feet if necessary, you should show goodwill to strangers and enemies, that you should love freely and wildly with abandon in silly directions—so there’s that. There are also, yes, to return to where you wanted your question to go, yeah, there are ways in which it asks for acts of trust, for wild jumps which are foolish if you buy the idea that we’re only ever supposed to put our feet on solid ground in this life, that we’re only supposed to go with what we can prove.

But that sounds like a life without imagination, as far as I’m concerned, and everybody uses their imagination, everybody is walking on fantastical or enchanted ground some of the time; it’s just that we don’t all acknowledge it. And when Christianity says, ‘Be foolish,’ sometimes it just seems to me to be saying, ‘There’s nothing under your feet,’ because there’s nothing under anybody’s feet at these moments, just be aware that you’re not standing on anything here; you’re leaning on the empty air and trusting it to take your weight.

David Rutledge: This makes me think of a passage in Unapologetic where you write that ‘belief demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual fluffy pretending.’ That turns the familiar atheist formula on its head. What do you mean when you say that?

Francis Spufford: I mean that a lot of contemporary atheism has swallowed some Enlightenment nonsense about humanity’s intrinsic goodness, that a lot of the time particularly kind of angry atheists seem to be working to a model in which we are naturally virtuous and happy creatures who have been hideously deformed by the pressures of religion. If you just took religion away, we’d kind of spring upwards to our natural forms and all would be well – which you can see in popular form in something like John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, which I’m very rude about in the book and I’m going to be rude about on the radio: I call it the My Little Pony of philosophical statements. And it’s complete crap. It’s – I’m going to be be really offensive – it’s a heroin addict’s pretence that everything is warm and soupy. That’s what it is.

And to base your idea of human nature on the idea that only external powers like nasty old religion – which is obviously done by something other than people – only that presses us out of shape, seems to me to be not only an illusion, but a very high-maintenance illusion. You have to stick your fingers in your ears and ignore huge amounts of human experience to keep that up.

And it produces these kind of cycles in public life, in which most of the time there’s this kind of indulgent ‘Yay us!’ stuff going on, followed by horrible stagey surprises, as something vile happens with a serial killer or with child abuse. And if we could manage to be a little more realistic about ourselves in the first place, if we could bring to bear some of the friendly pessimism which I think Christianity is rather good at, then we wouldn’t be constantly wrong-footed by this news – which shouldn’t be news anymore, ladies and gentlemen – about what we’re actually capable of. Christianity stops you from being surprised about the shit people do. The shit is built in to Christianity’s estimate of what people are. We don’t think that they are cuddly and fluffy, we think that they’re loveable with eyes absolutely open. And what we presume, hope for – possibly imagine – is a God who sees us absolutely plain, plainer than we can possibly see ourselves, and finds us of value anyway.

(Music)

David Rutledge: Francis Spufford. And on RN, you’re listening to Encounter.

(Music)

The tension between faith and reason has a lot to do with language and the fact that much like religious faith, language both points in the direction of certainty and fixed truth, but never quite delivers it up in full. Christian Wiman writes that language can create faith but can’t sustain it, and this is why reading the bible is so often a frustrating, even spiritually estranging experience. Which perhaps seems a little odd coming from a Christian poet.

Christian Wiman: It’s funny, I’m going to take exactly the opposite tack. I don’t think it is so strange coming from a poet, because it’s often the lack of poetry that throws me off when I read the Bible. A lot if it’s great: Jeremiah is great, Jobe is unbelievable—one of the great works of western literature—but most of it’s not, most of the Bible is dull. And it was written by committee, it was heavily edited for political reasons; it’s like a failed ultra-modernist project. That’s what Hugh Kenner thought; he considered it a modernist book that was just everything thrown in there. But I find it really, really tough going to try to take it in cumulatively.

David Rutledge: So when you write, yourself, the business of writing poetry for you, in writing are you trying to articulate things that lie outside of understanding, outside of rational apprehension? Does that describe what you’re doing as a poet?

Christian Wiman: That’s one property, or one potential poetry, I think, to get to the edge of words. But I sometimes… I mean, I tend think that we stress that at the expense of the other side of poetry, the simple clarities that make poetry possible, its capacity of rooting us very firmly on the earth instead of taking us beyond the earth. I think Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet who just died in August—a fantastic poet, I’ve read him all my life—years ago he wrote this devastating poem about his mother, after she died, it’s called ‘Mossbawn: Sunlight’.

And the poem, it sets up his mother’s absence at the beginning. We know that she’s died—he also says ‘in memoriam’ in the title, I believe. And then it ends, I’m quoting it here, but it ends with ‘now [she] sits, broad-lapped, / with whitened nails / and measling shins: / here is a space / again, the scone rising / to the tick of two clocks / And here is love / like a tinsmith’s scoop / sunk past its gleam / in the meal-bin.’

And that seems to me fantastic, because it does those two things that poetry can do: it takes you to the very edge of experience: What is human love like? And then it also centres us in absolutely concrete reality: What is love like? Well, it’s like that tinsmith’s scoop, which is suddenly not only concrete, but it’s sort of mysteriously ramifying beyond itself. In the terms which we started out with, this poem is completely rational even as it defeats all reason. It’s that capacity of poetry that I’m particularly drawn to.

So, yes, to get beyond words and beyond reality, take us to the very edge of it but also to take us right back to the concrete.

David Rutledge: That makes me think of something else that you’ve written, quite early in the book, as well – it might be something that you’ve reconsidered – but you talk about the necessity to require what you call a ‘monkish devotion’ to the source of poems and to the silence within you that enables that source to speak. What is the source and the silence? I mean, does this mean that communication to an audience, to a readership, is somehow a secondary concern?

Christian Wiman: I… personally I think the source is God. But it’s not really necessary to name it—I don’t care what name people give the source. Every poet seems to have some kind of source that they credit with their poems. So, you know, poems are mysterious things. As to whether I feel my primary responsibility to be to that source, the answer I guess is yes, but with a caveat. I want my poems to be clear. I’ve always wanted them to be intelligible to people who are not themselves experts in poetry. But if that requires betraying that original impulse then—I don’t know—to hell with it. I don’t want that.

There’s a great quote by the English poet Ruth Pitter—she’s almost forgotten now but she once wrote a beautiful little statement right at the beginning of her collected poems and saying you should do everything you can to eliminate… this is not a quote, but you should do everything you can to eliminate unnecessary obscurities but the essential ones you have to retain. And if you do retain them, with a kind of… that kind of fidelity, then a kind of grace may descend upon them both for the reader and the writer, and they can become essential to the work.

And I find Dickinson full of these moments where you can’t quite figure out the opacity, and I find Paul Celan, Wallace Stephens – I find Shakespeare full of these moments where suddenly you can’t quite figure out what’s being said but the very inscrutability is integral to the argument, integral to the whole of the piece.

Lisa Isherwood: I’m just on the edges in my own research of looking at how we actually communicate. And there are some fields of thought that say the actual spoken word is a very small part of how we communicate, and in many instances it’s just this kind of background noise—it’s just a sort of noise we make—that actually our communication, our real communication, is a much more embodied communication. And it’s just when we get into thinking it’s only the mind that can communicate that language then becomes a very heavy influence.

And, as you say, language lets us down all the time, all the time. It’s very difficult to communicate anything we feel and anything we think in very precise language, however articulate we might be.

I’m going to be very interested—I’m quite excited—I have a speech therapist starting a PhD with me, looking at the way Christianity has used language. And she’s saying, of course, she works with a lot of people who’ve lost the ability to use words but they still are very, very effective communicators, that once they get over the frustration of thinking, ‘The world communicates with words and I’ve lost them, I can’t do it,’ once they understand there are other ways of communicating, they’re very, very effective.

David Rutledge: It makes me wonder where this kind of theology is headed in terms of the medium of expression. I mean, you’re talking about a sort of body-based communication—I was last aware of this sort of work, I think, through the work of the so-called French feminists of the 1980s, who were people like Julia Kristeva, working on a ‘poetics’ rather than a sort of a prose-based philosophical approach. What’s happening with all that these days?

Lisa Isherwood: Well, I think it sort of went a bit quiet for a while but I think it is coming back again, a lot through art actually. This is quite interesting. A lot of feminist theologians and others are using art as an expression of theology. So, what am I saying? Through art, actually through poetry, and actually through talking a lot more about the body in very real ways, in terms of the body of the earth, less overt theological language, perhaps sort of power-laden theological language, much more about drawing people into the feelings about humanity and about bigger questions.

So there’s quite a bit of that going on and moving with that kind of fluidity of what theology could be. I mean, the result of all this has been that obviously it’s more difficult to actually state an undying truth through a piece of artwork than it is through a sort of verbal statement. And so what you’re getting developing through this if we wish to call it theological artwork is much more about how it’s perceived. So there’s a conversation opening, it’s very fluid, it’s full of different forms of communication, this thing about seeing and viewing and witnessing and putting that into the ongoing conversation rather than into, ‘Am I seeing it right? Have I got the right answer?’

So a lot of that work I think is positive. A lot of the sort of traditionalists won’t like it at all, because it’s not interested in coming up with the ‘right answer’; it’s very, very interested in the conversation, the communication, the flow, the fluidity. And I don’t wish to say that our mind is not active in any of this, but the rational process is not necessarily the dominant part in that engagement with art. It’s a different part of us that’s engaged and I think a fuller part.

Guests

Michael Jensen

Anglican Theologian and Rector of St Mark’s Anglican Church in Darling Point, Sydney

Francis Spufford

Author and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, Goldsmiths College, University of London

Barry Brundell MSC

Editor, Compass magazine, and Visiting Fellow in the School of History and Philosophy of Science, University of NSW

Christian Wiman

Poet and Senior Lecturer in Religion and Literature, Yale Divinity School

Lisa Isherwood

Professor of Feminist Liberation Theologies and Director of The Institute for Theological Partnerships, The University of Winchester, U.K.

Publications

Title

Unapologetic

Author

Francis Spufford

Publisher

Faber & Faber (London 2012)

Title

My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

Author

Christian Wiman

Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York 2013)

Title

My God, My God: Is It Possible To Believe Anymore?

Author

Michael P. Jensen

Publisher

Cascade Books (Eugene, Oregon 2013)

Music

Track

Cinder Hes

Artist

Gnist

Description

Unreleased

Track

Allegro Moderato (String Quartet in B minor op.33 no.1)

Artist

Borodin Quartet

Album

String Quartets op.33

Composer:

Joseph Haydn

Description

Onyx Classics ONYX4069 (2011)

Track

Lecture: Job 1, 20-22

Artist

Choeur Gregorien de Paris

Album

Job: Chant Gregorien

Description

Jade Records 29060 (1996)

Track

Zero Gravity

Artist

Monolake

Album

Gravity

Description

Monolake/Imbalance Computer Music ML006 (2001)

Track

Jomin

Artist

Gnist

Description

Unreleased

Credits

Producer

David Rutledge

Sound Engineer

Andrei Shabunov

Comments (12)

Michael Morrissey :

08 Jun 2014 6:33:10am

We humans have been evolving as an independent species for at least six million years. I would add to this that we humans as far as I am aware had always, when we existed as hunter gatherers, been composed primarily of family groups. Those evolving groups of humanity that did not communicate with other evolving groups of humanity and therefore interbreed with them have ceased to exist.

The point in all of this is that as we humans became the modern type of creature that we are now, we created legends that we told around the fire of an evening in order to teach the new and growing generation of children. As we humans started to farm and therefore become civilized we also started to invent new tool and ways to exist. One of these new tools was writing and depending on who you believe, either the "Mesopotamians or the Ancient Egyptians" invented writing. As we humans stated to write we also started to record the legends that we had told around the fire of an evening. These legends like much else had also evolved to reflect our more civilized form of existence.

Now to get to the point of this text, some people will say that there is no God or Creator, at least in modern scientific terms and they are countered by those who promote the existence of a God according to a text written, one, two or even many thousands of years ago. My explanation of how to understand ancient religious texts is to compare these legends to a final test that is given to those young tribal members who have or are becoming "fertile". If you accept this as a starting point in understanding ancient religious texts then the answer to these texts is simple, would you give a student the questions and answers to take into their final examination at school? If not and remembering that these ancient legends were taught to the new generation in order to test those who were to be initiated into the tribe at puberty and considering human fertility, those who failed could easily be replaced.

Now to use "Christianity" as an example of how the Roman Empire standardized these tests into a more civilized format, can you imagine a youngster being initiated by the ancient Hebrew Sanhedrin being asked, now who are you young man, and what do you want to do with yourself? Originally I imagine if you were to answer anything other than I’m a Hebrew too and I would like to be married, you would be either enslaved or executed, they could have quickly replaced any failure and later as we became more civilized, if you failed your initiation, then you were promised everlasting joy after death as long as you behaved properly and obeyed the laws.

David Miller, Atheist Society :

08 Jun 2014 10:27:42am

Unfortunately, many of my Atheist colleagues use the term 'rational' as a descriptor of their own beliefs. And, of course, the abuse-term 'irrational' is applied to the supernatural beliefs of others. This usage has entered their lexicon. When it is pointed out to them that the term 'rational' is applicable to the logical inferences drawn from a premise, and not to the premise itself, their reaction is hostile.

Nevertheless, my Atheist colleagues claim that supernatural premises are irrational. The supernatural can be defined as that which is beyond the natural. For example, fiction treated as reality is supernatural. However, this treatment should be labelled a 'category mistake' rather than 'irrational'.

The problem with popular science is that it has a constant propensity towards story-telling. On ABC TV we heard David Attenborough explaining that, as the plants wished to be pollinated, they developed scents and colours to attract the birds and insects. We would have to unpick and repack this story in order to understand the processes of natural selection. The story has anthropomorphised the plants by giving them abilities and faculties beyond the natural. This makes popular science an example of supernaturalism, but does it make it irrational?

Admittedly, most works of popular-science include in their introduction a caveat that when the author writes, for example, "the species outwitted evolution", it is to be taken metaphorically or poetically. But, annoyingly, the rest of the book is then written in this same supernaturalist vein.

Jeremiah :

08 Jun 2014 10:54:18pm

A lot of intelligent successful people appear to be believers in a deity and/or in religions whose essential beliefs are not consistent with one another. This is a little surprising, but it is not really too difficult to accept that evolution would allow for a combination of cognitive ability and religiosity to help the tribe's genes to multiply. And for thousands of years belief in an afterlife has been an effective part of the sales pitch even to people as smart as Pascal. Unfortunately, all this self indulgence matters because there is an unhappy tendency for the religious to move from their unprovable dogma to punishing people for doing things they think good because reasoning based on the dogma deems them bad.

David R Allen :

12 Jun 2014 8:44:06pm

I listened intently but was left with the feeling that the contributors were participating in an Olympic event for mental gymnastics. They kept trying to explain their religions by convoluted and intricate arguments that failed Ockham's Razor. Every issues raised could be explained in the absence of god by evidentiary argument. Some sounded like they were saying, "Yes, I know there's no evidence, but I don't care and I'm going to believe anyway." Faith after all, is the belief in something, in the absence of evidence, or in contradiction to the evidence. All admitted to a belief in god, as an act of faith.

I've heard evolutionary arguments that religion might be hardwired by into our brains, or at least, the propensity to believe in supernatural explanations. A tribe united and protected by a god will pass on more genes that a group of individualists.

I will walk shoulder to shoulder with the religious to support their right to practice their faith. But I think the debate has crystallized the nub of the issue, which is that religion is no longer a valid argument for the making of laws or the doing of things.

I think religion should be practiced by consenting adults in private, and has no place in running the world anymore. If your god demands you do something, then by all means do that, with the proviso that your action has no effect on anyone else. Because your god demands you to do something, is not a valid argument to force the rest of humanity to do it. Chaplains in schools is a case in point. Gay marriage.

Jim Boswell :

13 Jun 2014 3:41:33pm

Surely there are Feminists who can speak about Religion or Christianity with more meaning than Ms Isherwood. She does not believe in "Religion". She decries any need for logic. As a student of Theology who has rejected Religion I consider this discussion on Encounter absolutely useless. She Encounters nothing. She says It does not have to be logical. It does not have to be about "G/god". She is not an Atheist, nor a Theist, not Religious nor non-religious.

It is impossible to discuss any truth with someone who discounts any need for truth.

Everything is totally "flexible" - believing nothing. She cannot be wrong - because she claims nothing. Feminists must be appalled to be claimed by her.

ValK :

14 Jun 2014 10:17:23am

The arguments being set out by "Ms Isherwood" (that's "Professor Isherwood" to you, thanks Mr Boswell) are quite standard in feminist theology these days, and your absurd summary of them seems drive more by casual contempt than an actual desire to understand or engage with a mode of thought different from your own.

Feminists do not "decry any need for logic". Rather, we see logic as just one among many ways of knowing. Useful, but only up to a point. An epistemology based on the supremacy of logic ALONE is one-dimensional. Analytic philosophical logic is not very good at dealing with ambiguity or contradiction, which makes it great for getting jobs in Analytic Philosophy departments but limited as a means of getting down and dirty with the mess of real life. A theology ruled by logic is even more impotent, unless your understanding of God is very, very limited.

Far from being appalled by Lisa Isherwood, I applaud her for being neither atheist, nor theist, nor religious, nor non-religious - as I do anyone who manages to free themselves from these sterile categories.

I encourage you to read some of Lisa Isherwood's work. You will find that she believes and claims many things. Many of them will challenge your way of thinking and perceiving the world. Good luck.

Geof :

18 Jun 2014 1:33:01pm

I was heartened by Lisa Isherwood’s feminist approach. Work like hers is essential if the sphere of the rational is to be radically broadened to genuinely encompass the totality of what it is to be human. I agree with her claim that traditional concepts of rationality are constructs of the masculine intellect. For instance, it is not rational to produce theory that negates the importance of paradoxes and contradictions when both are so integral to the reality of our psyche.

"Oddly enough, the paradox is one of our most valuable spiritual possessions, while uniformity of meaning is a sign of weakness. Hence a religion becomes inwardly impoverished when it loses or waters down its paradoxes; but their multiplication enriches, because only the paradox comes anywhere near comprehending the fullness of life. Non-ambiguity and non-contradiction are one-sided and thus unsuitable to express the incomprehensible." C.J. Jung

Anita :

13 Jun 2014 5:22:51pm

As the speakers were indulging in this continuous stream of waffle, I had the pressing desire to ask them to "get real". It's possible their pontifications made sense to them, as they were all using the same emotionspeak, however they made no sense to me as I like words to actually represent reality.

At times a speaker would allude to a meaningful concept such as the fact that faith is a knowledge claim. These thoughts were not developed, unfortunately, but merely served as a springboard for even more waffle. The entire conversation consisted of one emotion-driven claim in support of another.

The speakers seemed to have come to an agreement that the Christian god was the god of choice, even though there are literally thousands from which to chose. This is where I began to hold out some hope of clear thinking as Christian Wiman confessed that he found the bible troubling. And well he should! Anyone who actually bothered to read this horrible text should be appalled! Truth to tell, there are a few worthwhile sentiments contained between the covers of this gruesome book, though they are thin on the ground.

Anita S :

13 Jun 2014 8:46:06pm

There was not much regard for evidence for this little band. They spoke intelligently, with obvious conviction and emotion. It could all be reduced to emotion as it turns out; never mind what's real as long as it FEELS right! It just so happens that god feels right and the god of the Christians at that! From all the possible gods on offer, this is the one that fits the bill; never mind the evidence.

Lisa didn't require words to convince her that she was on the right path, stating that most communication can be achieved "sans" words. Perhaps we listeners would have done better to simply feel the vibrations of the podcast instead of having to process the endless waffle that was presented as cogent argument.

The quality of the program did improve slightly after Christian Wiman confessed that he found the bible troubling. And well he might! Unfortunately this line of thought was not explored further, but rather hastily glossed over for ever more pious drivel and excruciating poetry.

Evangelist Anthony :

28 Jan 2015 2:52:47pm

This is for scientists:

"The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good. The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God. They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one." (Psalm 14:1-3)

"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen." (Romans 1:18-25)